Today I learned that if you have markdown installed, %!markdown will convert your markdown file to html.

Other favorite tricks include ctrl-v block highlighting , then shift-i + # to comment it out all at once.

Any others you guys can think of worth storing to memory?

i mean we could dive into vimrc tricks, for instance
nnoremap <c-j> 5j
nnoremap <c-k> 5k
#MOVESOFASTMUHFUCKASTRYNAFINEME

and this is interesting but takes some getting used to
set relativenumber

so then instead of canonical line numbers you get relative offset from the cursor. I've been trying to stop mashing j after reading this awesome article.

blog.sanctum.geek.nz

Restore position in file.

au BufReadPost * if line("'\"") > 0 && line("'\"") <= line("$") | execute "normal g'\"" | endif

"Convenience mappings"
inoremap jj <Esc>`^
inoremap JJ <Esc>`^
cnoremap w!! %!sudo tee > /dev/null %

"Reasonable line movement"
nnoremap j gj
nnoremap k gk
vnoremap j gj
vnoremap k gk

"Window movement mappings"
nnoremap <c-h> <c-w>h
nnoremap <c-l> <c-w>l
nnoremap <c-j> <c-w>j
nnoremap <c-k> <c-w>k

Watch your productivity soar with these. The first few make it easy to get out of insert mode, and w!! let's you save a file in case you forgot to sudo before hand.

The mapping of j and k to gj and gk respectively allow you to move over virtual lines as if they were real lines.

The last batch lets you move between windows like a real ninja.

I guess we could transition this to 'best vim plugins for productivity' too.

I'd have to say ctrl-p by far is the most used in my workflow.
kien.github.com
it's amazing.

Vera uses peepopen, and it seems like an even better version. You should try that out.

It's pretty good but ctrl-p is better for switching buffers. But you guys should all just switch to emacs and use evil-mode for vim bindings for reals.

(~_~;) never will I fall from the path of vim-glory. I have a flaming vim logo tattooed on my chest for a reason.
vim.org
(yes, the animated version)

Evil-mode covers everything that's good about vim.

emacswiki.org

twimg0-a.akamaihd.net

Ok, I'm fairly intrigued, but what does emacs give me that I don't have already?

But... command t?

or ctrl+p

@hursh ido-mode > command-t + ctrl-p

@andrew shells. lisp. compilers. inline on the fly syntax checking. all the things. rake, bundler, tests etc in emacs.

But ultimately it doesn't matter. apple and oranges.

Also check out EasyMotion in vim. Takes the cake for moving around a buffer.

github.com

Oh right, you were talking about this! Cool.

For those who have to work with HTML, MatchTag and MatchIt are must haves. The former does the equivalent of "set showmatch" for HTML tags, and the latter lets you jump to matching tags using %.

github.com
github.com

There's also a matchit for Ruby to match end tags with their origins:
github.com

Damn- have definitely been needing ruby-matchit. Thanks!

Coming from Sublime before vim, I missed the file drawer that sat on the side while I worked for easy navigation. Thankfully, I quickly found NERDTree for vim, which provides the same functionality (but with all the awesomeness of vim). Definitely helps for jumping around.

github.com

Nice- so one thing I still envy about the sublime experience is that slick "find all occurrences in all files and show me them in one window". @Joe (or anyone)- ever find a substitute?

Ack.vim 'kinda works' but is a bit finnicky.

@Andrew - unfortunately, no. I have the "subl" symlink mapped so if I need the "shift-cmd-f" functionality from Sublime, I just exit vim and open up whatever I'm working on with that. It's definitely not ideal, but I still don't have to use a mouse to do it haha. I haven't been successful in finding an alternative (though, admittedly, I haven't done much sleuthing).

@Andrew: the ghetto version is to run this from your project root:

$ find . -name "*.rb" | xargs grep "stuff"

I believe there's some grep options that let you show the lines around the "found" line, but I don't recall them at the moment.

(And of course you can run that from within vim)

:!find . -name "*.js" | xargs grep "encodeURIComponent"

Would be nice to tie that into ctrl+p or some such.

I really like persistant undos. Sometimes I'm working on a file (a) without version control or (b) where I don't want to revert all the changes (just some).

if has('persistent_undo')
set undofile "so is persistent undo ...
set undolevels=1000 "maximum changes to undone
set undoreload=10000 "maximum number lines to save
endif

Baller, I've just incorporated the persistant undos, a window movements, and an animated gif tattoo into my vimrc. Also matchit might be the greatest thing ever.

I do wish ack wasn't so finicky (it just doesn't seem to persist through all of an enormous rails directory), sublime has us there.

I almost forgot, my favorite line(s) of my vimrc:
autocmd FileType ruby highlight OverLength ctermbg=darkred ctermfg=white guibg=#FFD9D9
autocmd FileType ruby match OverLength /\%81v.\+/

For now I only have it on ruby, but highlights anything past 80 characters in a line. Its probably impacted my programming more than anything else in my vimrc.

Devon, I've been thinking about adding lines like that to my vimrc, but I've always hesitated. I suppose setting it to only happen for things like Ruby and Python might be reasonable though.

For those of you using NERDTree, I highly recommend adding these lines to your vimrc:

"NERDTree settings"
let NERDTreeIgnore = ['\.pyc$', '\~$', '\.rbc$']
let NERDTreeMinimalUI=1
let NERDTreeDirArrows=1

They make the ui significantly cleaner and better looking.

By the way, is there anything that'll let me diff the current contents of the buffer with the how it looked when I opened it? That would be amazing. Fugitive gets pretty close by letting me diff with the last commit, but it isn't quite the same.

Since no one ever writes perfect code, I've found this handy shortcut for doing a git blame on the current line i'm on.

nmap B :ec system('git blame -L'.line('.').',+1 '.expand('%'))<CR>

That's pretty awesome. Doesn't github.com vim-fugitive do that for you? I have it installed but don't know much about it. @Bilal diffing with the last commit sounds great- what are the other power-tools in fugitive you use?

BTW just did this and wondered how I lived without it before
imap <tab> <c-p>
Tab completion!

also this.
robots.thoughtbot.com

@andrew, I like the tab logic, but your banking on the idea that you'll only have to tab after whitespace (ie. \n).

Maybe ctrl+tab or shift+tab would be better?

@justin, baller

@Justin
You should checkout fugitive like @Andrew suggested. Commands like :Gblame and :Gdiff make it ridiculously awesome.

@Andrew
Gblame and Gdiff are what I use most. Gmove is pretty cool too. How hard do you think it would be to implement something to diff the current contents of the buffer with how it looked since the file was opened? I've looked all over for something like that, but can't find anything.

I feel like a noob, but i just discovered ZZ == :wq

map ; :

yes essential

In case you guys have played with the OSX for hackers gist gist.github.com, these three commands are probably the most useful. Definitely nice for making you move faster in vim and terminal.

Disable press-and-hold for keys in favor of key repeat
defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

Set a blazingly fast keyboard repeat rate
defaults write NSGlobalDomain KeyRepeat -int 0.02

Set a shorter Delay until key repeat defaults write NSGlobalDomain InitialKeyRepeat -int 12